Christian Pastor Knows Exactly Why Those Tornadoes Devastated Indiana

Christian pastor John Piper knows exactly why tornadoes recently hit Marysville and Henryville, Indiana.

Wanna take a guess…?

Oh, you know exactly where this is going, don’t you…

We do not ascribe such independent power to Mother Nature or to the devil. God alone has the last say in where and how the wind blows. If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.

…

This is a word to those of us who sit safely in Minneapolis or Hollywood and survey the desolation of Maryville and Henryville. “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Every deadly wind in any town is a divine warning to every town.

…

God’s will for America under his mighty hand, is that every Christian, every Jew, every Muslim, every person of every religion or non-religion, turn from sin and come to Jesus Christ for forgiveness and eternal life. Jesus rules the wind. The tornadoes were his.

God is sending the tornadoes as a warning. REPENT!

(How do you know when a Christian is truly out of touch with reality? They refuse to allow comments on their website. Piper doesn’t want to hear about how wrong he is. He’s perfectly fine with a one-way conversation.)

Anyway, maybe he’s just auditioning for an opening at Westboro Baptist Church.

Talk about twisted theology…

To any Christians out there, don’t defend this guy. And don’t stay silent. He’s full of shit and you know it. Say so openly. ***Update***: Good start right here.

Piper is approaching Pat Robertson levels. Robertson said on the 700 Club that if the people hit by the tornadoes had just prayed, everything would’ve been ok:

“If enough people were praying [God] would’ve intervened, you could pray, Jesus stilled the storm, you can still storms”

At least most Christians admit Robertson is crazy.

Piper, on the other hand, is still considered a “widely respected” evangelical pastor. That has to stop.

…

For anyone wondering where tornadoes *actually* come from, I’m just gonna leave this right here.

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jamssx

Last summer they blamed Irene on NY’s passing of gay marriage, yet the storm slowed significantly just before reaching NYC leaving the city virtually untouched. Hmmm… By their own logic it lay waste to the pius bible belt and spared the ‘evil’ city so I guess we know who their god supports.
Mike D

For Pat Robertson, that’s actually one of his less nutty quotes. I mean, to his credit, he starts out by saying that God doesn’t send tornadoes. True! Then he blows it by saying that enough people praying can “calm a storm”. False! In this case, he’s actually slightly less of a nutbar than John Piper.
Rev. Ouabache

I want someone to do the research. Has a tornado ever hit Hollywood? If not, does this prove that God has incredibly bad aim?
Anonymous

I loathe these fucking people and their sick, twisted theology. Especially John Piper and his ilk.

“It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die. God is taking life every day. He will take 50,000 lives today. Life is in God’s hand. God decides when your last heartbeat will be, and whether it ends through cancer or a bullet wound. God governs. So God is God! He rules and governs everything. And everything he does is just and right and good. God owes us nothing.”

http://www.christianpost.com/news/what-made-it-ok-for-god-to-kill-women-children-in-old-testament-68737/

Then why the fuck do they care about abortion? It’s their god’s doing. He’s behind it.
Rich Wilson

There was a point when the woman started talking about our warmer weather. But alas it was too much to hope that they would admit the climate is changing.

(Yes, I know a warm winter is not AGW, but they don’t seem to know that)
Anonymous

Did he just say the Earth is faulted? How dare he say god made the Earth faulty……

😛
Don Gwinn

My name is Don, and I’m from Illinois, and I’d love to ask Pat Robertson why God did it, too . . . . . but sadly, that was a different “Don from Illinois.”

I do think it’s awesome that Pat Robertson thinks we should abandon the heartland because it has stormy weather. “Look, people, I KNOW you’re hungry, and I KNOW some bacon would taste good, but I’m not going back into that swirling death-land just to plant some corn and slop some hogs, OK? I’m staying right here in Los Angeles where it’s safe. Clearly God just doesn’t want us to use the midwest for some reason. His ways are mysterious to us.”
Don Gwinn

Progress, though. I assumed this was going to be about how God picked off a few innocent people in small Illinois towns like Harrisburg as a warning to the rest of us because Illinois recognizes “civil unions” between same-sex couples.
Richard Wade

Randomly pick any kind of disaster such as earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, typhoon, cyclone, tornado, flood, drought, blizzard, famine, epidemic, wildfire, or Charlie Sheen contract. Then type it into Google with the place name and the words “blamed on”. For example: Washington DC earthquake blamed on. Among the first results you’ll find at least one religious leader blaming it on God’s wrath against whatever or whoever is their pet peeve or favorite scapegoat.

The bigger the death toll, the more religious blamers there will be citing divine displeasure, and the wider the variety of people who will be blamed. The 2004 Indonesian tsunami produced provoked several shamans of every major religion to blame every imaginable fall guy.

God’s capricious mayhem and legendary bad aim with a continent-sized shotgun is always so convenient for justifying the hatred of any religious group for somebody else, and for satisfying their sadistic desire to see them suffer.
David Kempton

There is NO tornado, no wind send from “God” that can begin to match the amount of wind coming from the Pied Piper and Robbers-son…

HEY – YOU WITH THE PRAYER BOOKS AND THE TRANSPARENTLY EVIL INTENT…
You DARE call yourselves men of God. You pathetic asswipes. If there WERE a Devil, if Satan were real, and not a product of your fear-based agenda, he would proudly claim you as his own.

As your whole fairy tale does not exist, and never has, it just means that there is no one to claim you. You are alone in your deluded universe, except for the other idiots that let you do their thinking for them.

Plese, for the sake of the people (and sheep) of the world, just – go away. Go to heaven, or hell or something. Just leave us the fuck ALONE to live OUR lives, not your little black book’s…
Anonymous

I want someone to do the research. Has a tornado ever hit Hollywood? If not, does this prove that God has incredibly bad aim?

Or as Jay Leno said (about 30yrs ago):

“If God doesn’t destroy Times Square, then he really owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology”

🙂
David Philip Norris

The sad thing is that I was actually going to Piper’s church in 2009 when the tornado struck downtown Minneapolis, and he blamed it on the gays. That was the point that I began to seriously question Christianity.
Anonymous

Couldn’t he easily just say God is mad at the climate change deniers? At least there would be a little science behind his claim.
Marguerite

As I was reading through an article on the tornado, I saw one person saying she prayed to “the Father, Son and Holy Ghost” and that this was what kept her family safe. I wondered if she’d really thought this through, and if she honestly thought that God went around slaughtering people just because they were a bit behind on their prayers (or, in the case of very small children, people who haven’t yet learned to utter prayers). If I believed that God was like that, I’d “repent,” all right– I’d repent of ever believing in such a God.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/miracle-baby-survived-tornado-killed-family/story?id=15839644#.T1X64_ES0n0
John A. Anderson

As a native of West Virginia, I fully agree with the clergymen above. You’ll notice that as soon as those tornadoes reach the Ohio River, they peter out. They never make it into The Mountain State. That’s because we are without sin. The mountains have nothing to do with it. Really.
Iosue

Not that I myself agree with the book of Job, but this nutjob’s raionale for disaster falling on certain people is the same rationale claimed by Job’s “friends” who say all these terrible things have happened because Job was a bad person, while Job consistently maintained his innocence (an innocence that is, according to the text, upheld even by Yahweh).

Rather than use other’s people’s misery as a prop for one’s smug and inhuman ideology, one ought to help these people out, seeing how they desperately need it. What a useless excuse for a human being. Even animals have better sense than this “Reverend.”
Fargofan1

Whenever people respond this way, their lack of compassion makes me sick. In other words, “Those victims had it coming!” It must be nice to have all the answers about why tragedy strikes. Too bad their answers are insanely wrong.

I especially like, “The tornadoes were his.” Hey Jesus, are you missing a couple tornadoes?
Iosue

Gawdly logic: When it happens to other people, their god is condemning them (or using them as an “example”). But when it happens to me, “god is just testing me.” Mighty convenient how it always works out that way.

This isn’t just a matter of a lack of compassion and empathy for others, but belief to an elaborate ideology constructed in order to do away with any compassion and empathy.

And people wonder why atheists find religion morally reprehensible?
Anonymous

A few people that I work with are from Henryville (I live in Louisville) and I never once heard them say that there were prayers not being answered or answered for each individual home or business that got destroyed. My co-workers considered themselves very lucky and according to my local news they have had to turn volunteers away from helping because there’s so many people wanting to help.
JoeBuddha

Considering how people who were rescued credit god and prayer for their survival, I have a truly hard time believing those who died weren’t praying just as hard.
Mairianna

I guess god’s plague called “AIDS” wasn’t enough of warning.
Anonymous

So when a comet strikes the planet Jupiter, does that mean god sent it to punish the inhabitants of Jupiter?
Gadgetgranny

I trust this is irony?
Ellen Tannenbaum

When I saw the headline “Why Did So Many Tornados Hit the Midwest?” on a news site, my immediate expectation was to see it blamed on moral decay/incurring god’s wrath, or else blamed on Obama (or, of course, ObamaCare).
Frothsloth

I learned from watching WKRP when I was a teenager that tornados are, in fact, godless.
Richard Wade

No, it means he sent it as a warning to the sinners in Minneapolis and Hollywood.

In 1994, I watched comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collide with Jupiter through a telescope on a mountain overlooking Hollywood, and I can tell you that not one of those sinners down there was running around repenting. I could see them. They just kept right on sinning. It was amazing how oblivious those sinners could be to what was happening just 391 million miles away.

No idea about what the sinners in Minneapolis were doing.
WF Householder

Hey Hemant,

I found this on I H8 Religion’s Tumblr page: http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/03/03/vo-nat-west-liberty-tornado-prayers.cnn

Now, what do you have to say to that? 😉
Anonymous-Sam

I seem to remember an assurance in the Bible that Jesus having died for our sins meant that God wouldn’t be annihilating us with random acts of nature out of anger anymore.

At the very least, I recall from Luke, “Do you imagine that they were worse sinners than everybody else?” In other words, bad things don’t happen to bad people because they’re bad. Bad things happen to everyone. You celebrate when they happen to bad people and weep when they happen to good people. Period.
Anonymous

For some reason God likes to punish people in certain places much more often than other places. Ironically, it is the Deep South and Texas that he punishes the most.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/05/01/weekinreview/01safe.html
Xeon2000

Yeah, that’s pretty dumb. Obviously Aeolus rules the wind, and the tornados are because the silly Christians no longer give praise and offerings to the real gods.
amyc

When will you people learn? It was obviously Enlil!!
mountainguy

I was thinking about Job’s friends too. good comment
mountainguy

I think Piper has not reached Pat Robertson nuttiness mostly because he doesn’t seem to be very into the “christian nation” bs, and has left politics aside. Not that I share his views about theometereology…
Sharon Hypatia

John 9: 1 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” plus Matthew 25:45 “For I was hungry
and you fed me;….”

Just so many parts of the bible you have to ignore when you are a self-righteous ass.
SteveS

Why does god seem to like to make his points so ambiguously? After all, I’ll bet most of the dead were christians… as were most of the victims in Tuscaloosa and Joplin last year. Why doesn’t he demonstrate his power and selectively kill all us atheists, the gays – hell, I’m gay, atheist, left-handed, and half Jewish. I should be a marked man… Instead, he is aiming storms at the faithful and killing the odd flock of blackbirds. The simple truth of the matter is that we are dealing with a learned psychosis here. I guess it would be too much to ask that big government shoot them in the butts with tranquilizer darts and haul them in for therapy?
Anonymous

God seems to like to make examples of specific target groups by killing random samplings of people not necessarily related to the target groups, using means that can easily be otherwise explained by someone with an elementary school science education. Get it now?
Anonymous

II Kings 2:23-24
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
Lagerbaer

See, just the other day there was a post up by Adam of Daylightatheism about how religion never progresses. Wouldn’t it be a great research topic for sophisticated theologians to study just how many people need to pray for how long and how hard to avert a tornado?
Anonymous-Sam

It’s not just in destruction, either. Ever notice how there’s never a miracle nowadays that couldn’t be explained by sheer coincidence? Even all the “miraculous healings” are never anything more remarkable than cancer going into remission (which happens all the time).

For a decent website on the subject, try http://whywontgodhealamputees.com
Nackles

Why do people think statements like this make their god MORE appealing rather than less? Any being that would act to start a tornado, but not to prevent atrocities, is not one decent people should worship anyway.
Anonymous

I am still waiting to see him press 1,000 pounds like he claimed…
Andrew Schott

If an F4 tornado comes through your town, how many will die? God’s work is being done in Henryville, and he didn’t intervene because we will all grow in his love through this and bring people to him. You should not judge unless you want to be judged. Read your bible for we are not blaming our God.